Many blessings for this new year...Let's embrace all of the hardships that we may encounter, and all of the pain that we may endure - and look forward to the happiness that is sure to come. I always try to start out a new year full of hope, because without it, the year quickly becomes stale even before it's started.
This year, I've got a few goals already.
1. Save money. This is for obvious reasons - I want this year to be the one in which we are able to buy land.
2. Market our soaps and other bath/beauty products. I'd love to hone my recipes, find a few that REALLY work well, and make those recipes until I can create soap from them with my eyes closed. Well, not really, since I'd be working with caustic lye...
3. Pay down more of my student loans. Hopefully I'll be able to start my job soon. Even if it is considered part-time, it would be a good opportunity for me to use some of my earnings from it every month to pay down my bill.
4. Exercise more often, get more fresh air. 2011 wasn't really full of traveling adventures. We did go to the Philippines, but the rest of the year was mostly spent somewhere indoors. Ick!
I'm starting to list more items in my Etsy shop. It's important to get many listings on there because people will know that you offer a variety of products. I update my soaps' Facebook page, too, so that people on there will also know when new items are listed in Etsy. Synchronizing those two will help in the long run, I hope! I will also work on creating four recipes, two of them being all-vegetable (or "vegan"), and two of them based on animal fats. I already have a very good, basic "vegan" recipe, but I'd like to try making another with shea butter. I'll also be experimenting with beef tallow and more lard.
In a few days, I will hopefully do a post about how to make soap. I will show pictures of some ingredients that you might consider putting in soap. Unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to document the whole process with pictures or video, since I will be making the soap alone, but you'll get to see the beginning, middle, and end. Also, I'll be adding poppy seeds! I might do a video on unmolding the soaps from my new soap mold, however.
**Another fun thing I did a couple of days ago. I ordered some extremely hot pepper seeds online. I am so excited to get them next week. I ordered Amish bush, which grows to be a small plant with Thai-chili shaped peppers; a Brazilian pepper that is also small and bushy and has some of the smallest yet very hot peppers; red Bhut jolokia, which is so far the hottest pepper I've tried in a hot sauce - I haven't eaten one fresh!; and Trinidad scorpion butch T seeds, which are supposedly going to produce the hottest known peppers in the world. All of these will most likely be put in hot sauces or salsas - I don't think I'd eat them as whole peppers...yet! But I'll put up a post on germinating these. They will probably be grown in 5 gal. buckets so I can lug them around.
Not only that, but we ordered a bunch of vegetable seeds from Southern Exposure. Most are heirlooms - totaling almost $50. BUT - if we grow out a lot of them, we can be saving some money or at the very least (even if we don't save $50 because we'd be using water and soil) we would know where our foods came from. Once we grow them out, we could save seeds and we wouldn't need to order more. So really, it is a win-win situation. Much of what we've ordered do well in droughts. Southern Exposure also offers plenty of seeds from the South...
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